Optical media is home to much higher quality media though. CDs have a higher bitrate than MP3s bought from any online storefront and definitely sound better....blu-rays (heck even some DVDs) look vastly superior to any highly compressed streaming or "digital copy" version.

You may want the optical to die but you're all willing to accept such terrible compromises with regards to quality it makes me cringe.

"our customers have given us a lot of trust."

No, they just flat out tell their customers what to think and the cultists believe everything blindly.

I can't remember the last time I used my optical drive. Even my netbook from 2010 that I've had until now didn't have an optical drive; I never needed it anyhow. Nowadays, you can even install operating systems via 4 gig flash drives as long as you can copy the disk files from someone else's optical drive. It's not like you install OSs all day, right?

The only reason I got an optical drive (Blu-Ray) for my 2012 build was to put them on my media server for my PS3/WD TV Live. My wife and I love watching BD movies, none of the streaming services come to close to the fidelity. I see optical drives hanging around for awhile yet.

Apple has a major investment in iTunes so of course they will limit support for outside media.

Optical media is home to much higher quality media though. CDs have a higher bitrate than MP3s bought from any online storefront and definitely sound better....blu-rays (heck even some DVDs) look vastly superior to any highly compressed streaming or "digital copy" version.

You may want the optical to die but you're all willing to accept such terrible compromises with regards to quality it makes me cringe....

Most streaming video is terrible quality, but we passed transparency for audio a while back.

Not for multi-channel audio. I can definitely hear the difference between a Netflix stream and my movies on Blu-Ray.

I was talking about audio settings (i.e. It'll be hard to find somebody who can actually tell the difference between 256Kbps AAC and FLAC, etc.). Audio for streaming media does often suffer though (I swear YouTube uses mono audio for some quality settings)